I'm (Slightly) Famous

While shopping at my neighborhood convenience store last week, the clerk informed me that he is a newspaper columnist. He asked me if I would be interested in doing an interview and taking a few pictures with my students. I said OK, of course, so the man visited my school during lunch last thursday and conducted the interview.

I have a link to the online version of the article here, just click on the paper with a picture of a boat on the cover and go to page 24. It's also available in print, so if you are currently in Seosan just go to a paper box and pick up a free copy of 'Go Cha Ro Plus'.

He asked me maybe 7 or 8 questions, and he seemed interested in whether I would be willing to marry a Korean woman, have kids, and raise them here. I told them I am open the that possibility but I wouldn't want to raise a kid here. The school system is a little too ridiculous. He also knew I was a musician, so I told him about our band Iron Kimchee and how we have a show in a few weeks.

One thing I maybe shouldn't have said was when he asked me what is different about Korea and USA. I was on the spot and couldn't think of many things, and I told him that it's dirtier here. It got printed. Oops, sorry Korea.

Please, Stop that Racket

We have this interesting problem at school: a shop two doors down is having some kind of amazing sale, and to promote it they are blasting ridiculous and loud dance music during my entire afternoon schedule. It is loud enough that we can hear every word of every song clear as day inside of my classroom. To make things worse (maybe better?) there are two girls who dance on platforms in front of traffic right in front of the store. All of the time it's either two girls dancing to music, or sometimes one of the girls picks up a microphone and starts yapping about the sale they are having. I went and took some video with my camera:

In the video I'm not sure if the girls just don't want me taking pictures of them, or if it's illegal or something, but I don't really care.

Today I was giving my fourth and fifth grade class a test, which is supposed to be silent. The whole time the music is just blaring, and I'm singing along in my head to Lil' John while he sings "shots shots shots...shots shots shots shots shots...everybody....etc." Please make it stop. Please.

It was a Monster Mash

Following the children's Halloween party was a more grown up party for the near-adults that live in Seosan. We all went to the beach, this place called Mallipo which is about 45 minutes away by bus. It took place in what is called a pension. This is where a room can be rented with a kitchen and a bunch of blankets and stuff for sleeping. We slept about 20 crazy drunk people in the room.

The night included a lot of drinking and a lot of cool costumes. It was also the going away party for a popular foreigner in Seosan named Sam. I tried to load a video onto here, but it ended up being about 1 gigabyte of data, so sorry about that. I do have picture of some of the cooler costumes, so enjoy:

Terry as Aburahame Lincoen.

Jake in the tracksuit from Kill Bill and a crazy mask, with Jordy as a Scotsman.

Here is the beach and a beautiful sunset.

A very Harry Potter sunset with Kinsey and Larry

Joe as an Indian call center employee

Skeleton Kelsey and Sam as Kelly Kapowski

Megan and Rob as Luke and Leia

Michael as Santa and Wil as an Ahjuma

Jordy played a bagpipe concert for us outside of the room, which I'm sure the neighbors loved

Megan, Kelsey, and me as Zombie John Lennon

So those are the best costumes that I took pictures of, there were actually a lot of other cool ones that I didn't have my camera around for. The highlight of the night was when Kelsey kept getting texts from a Korean guy in Seoul, and then kept calling. We had Joe answer the phone as Indian call center guy, and had a conversation with him for about 10 minutes. I have about 4 mintues of HD video of it, but it's too big to fit on the site, so sorry.

That's it for Halloween, but I'm going to try to do a lot of blogging soon to clear out my backlog. Keep reading!

A Happy Halloween

I figure I better use up the material I have from Halloween since I don't want it to become stale and its already a week past the holiday. Anyway, for those who don't know, Halloween is the biggest holiday of the year at my school. The school is decorated starting in October, then the week of more decorations come in, and then the day of it gets ridiculous. All of the windows are blacked out, a haunted house is made in our computer lab, and all of the kids dress up in costumes.

I'll get to some of the costumes first, and then more on the haunted house later. Here is probably my favorite costume of all the kids. This is a 5 year old named William as a vampire:

Here is 6 year old Martin as a Batman Zoro hybrid I think:

Tom, 7, as some kind of masked vampire (Rex is in the back picking his nose):

This kid as a toy soldier is Kevin, but I usually call him Candy to rile him up:

Lucy as something. Maybe a witch?

So now the haunted house. The kids brought in loads of boxes to make kind of a maze inside of our biggest room. We had about 150 boxes which were stacked to form the walls of the maze, then black plastic wrap is put over all of them. There are a few other decorations inside, including this fortune teller's head inside of a bubble that you can see below:

Anyway, for the haunted house, all of the lights are turned off and the kids are sent to crawl under table thing. Then waiting around a corner was Kelsey who jumped out and scared them. Then they came to the next corner and I jumped out to get them, and they had to go back and go past Kelsey. Then another teacher chased them around the rest of the maze, including one part where I could reach my hand through a hole in the boxes and grab at their legs.

So every kid in the school was forced to go through this thing, which I found somewhat terrifying myself. I would say over half of the kindergarteners cried for their mommies, but it didn't matter if they cried because they were forced to finish the rest of the haunted house. Here is a picture of Joseph while I am scaring him:

Most of the 6 and 7 year olds calmed down, but for some reason the teachers kept going with terrorizing the 5 year olds. One teacher ran into their room in a goblin mask to frighten them while Kelsey was trying to calm them. This went on for minutes, and Kelsey claimed that by the time they finally left them alone, her pants were soaked in tears. Soaked in tears.

So I'm going to leave on a happy note, anyway. My second favorite costume is this kid Alex who went as a male policeman stripper:

Look! More Mascots and Signs

It looks like this will be my last post in October, so I wanted to end October with a bang. This is another post from my August trip to Busan. Busan is a really great city to visit, and has some absolutely spectacular mascots and some mind-boggling signs. If anyone has ideas for alternate captions, post them in the comments and if I like it I'll bring you something from Korea.

"This is my fifth aneurysm and yet I keep coming back for more!"

"I'll lay down so you can take a bite of my delicious back meat."

"Orange train wins again!"

"Migrain chicken is amazing..."

"Quiet please while us monks do our bidness."

"Mexican is best tasting nationality."

I have no idea what this sign could be about. If anyone reads this who is Korean please let me know if you can translate.

Okay, I'm trying to think if this is a typo, but I can't possibly think of a typo that would bring the word crotch into the description of something served at a restaurant.

Beomeosa Temple

And back to my trip to Busan from a few months ago, this is definitely one of the highlights. Busan features an absolutely beautiful Buddhist temple called Beomeosa located halfway up a mountain on the north side of town. The trip involved about 45 minutes on the subway and maybe another 20 on the bus, so it was definitely worth the trip....twice. My friend Daniel and I went on an afternoon and didn't have enough time, so we went straight back there again the next morning.

So a little background then, I guess. According to Wikipedia, this temple was built in the year 678 originally but burned down a few times. The main hall and front gate were reconstructed in 1612, and still stand. Well that's all I will say about the history anyway, since I mostly just enjoyed the scenery. Here is a picture of the nearby mountains:

This is the long walkway leading up to the front entrance:

The side of one of the buildings was lined with bamboo trees, which looked great:

Some great artwork on one of the doors:

A few tiny monks keeping watch:

A nice view of one of the buildings:

One of the older buildngs, I'm guessing it's up for renovation soon:

There were four guards keeping watch at one of the fountains, and here is one:

Some prayer beads lining a wall:

This is definitely one of my favorite photos, the monk on a cell phone. Another interesting monk moment was when I went into the bathroom and noticed that a monk was just finishing up his business. I'm sure this is not true for every monk, but he did not wash his hands.

All in all my few hours spent there were pretty great. I got some really nice gifts from the shop, too, including a bracelet for my little sister with tiny wooden skull beads. There was also a great picnic area with some large rocks located in a stream flowing down the moutain. It was really nice but also super packed with picnicing people.

Beomeosa was my favorite temple I've been to, even if not all of the employees wash before returning to work. I would like to do a temple stay soon and it is on the top of the list of candidates. The only problem is that its at least 4 hours of travel time each way.

I Went to Busan in August

So most readers here know that I didn't blog most of August and September, so there's a bit of a backlog. Upcoming series include my trip back to the U.S.A. and some events from recent weekends. Right now, though, I am going to describe the trip I took to Busan, a large Korean city on the southern shore.

Busan's population is about 3.6 mil according to Wikipedia, so it's a pretty big city. I chose it for the beaches pretty much, as the first week of August is a great time to sit on a beach all day in Korea. It turned out they also have a really great temple located on a mountain, a modern art museum, and a lot of cool mascots. Look for posts on these soon.

The trip to Busan involves Korea's high speed train system, the KTX. This was one of the most exciting parts of the trip for me to be able to finally take the train. I travelled with my friend Daniel, and he insisted that we ride first class. It was only a few dollars more, and the seats were very spacious and offered all the water you can drink. To get to the KTX line I had to take a one and a half hour trip to Daejeon, followed by about two hours aboard the KTX.

From the KTX it was an easy transfer to the subway in Busan, and then quickly to the beach. There was some interesting scenery on the way:

The beach we spent most of the time at was called Gwangali Beach. From what I understand there are two main beaches in Busan, Gwangali and Haeundae. From my friend Daniel's experience Haeundae is a bit overcrowded, so we spent most of the time at Gwangali. Here is a picture of scenic Gwagnali beach. It's basically the beach on the right with a line of hotels, restaurants, and bars on the left. Really nice.

This is a piece of artwork that I enjoyed at the beach:

A restaurant that I visited no less that three times was called Breeze Burns. It had really great hamburgers, decently cheap beer, and some chili cheese fries that destroyed my digestive system one night:

Here's a picture of the other beach, Haeundae. This place was absolutely packed but we spent one night hanging out there drinking beers on the beach.

One of my favorite parts of the trip was travelling back from Haeundae beach to our motel, where we entered the taxi of one of craziest guys ever. This man knew his way around Busan, and would travel about 145 km/hr over bridges and swerve around the slower cars. This guy was awesome.

Our nights were spent at a motel called the Seoul Motel, recommended to us by some random guy we met in Busan. It was a trip down the subway line, but worth the trip because it costs only 30,000 Won (about 25 American) a night.

My last night there was spent at Gwangali again so that I could snap a picture of this beautifully lit bridge at night. It was cool, too, because it looks like the end of the world at the top of the reflection of the lights:

So Busan really was a great trip, I enjoyed my 5 days there. I feel a little bad that I didn't write about it sooner so that I could remember more about it. If I was to come back to Korea, I would definitely look into Busan.

My First Typhoon

The same day my little sis' was coming to town, I ended up having an unexpected visitor. This one was a lot louder, noisier, and left much more debris on the streets. This one was a typhoon.

So a typhoon is actually just a hurricane, but they call them typhoons when they happen in the Pacific Ocean and not the Atlantic. I'm not sure why that is. The storm seemed to start about 5 in the morning with very loud wind followed by breaking glass and crashing sounds. It was pretty ridiculous. The sounds subsided around 7 in the morning, so I was able to fall back into sleep.

I carried on with my day basically as any other, eating breakfast and heading to work. The trip to work was definitely interesting, lets just say that I had to dodge a ton of broken glass on the sidewalks because of all the broken glass. I got to work, and my boss and the other teachers were sitting around a table, as it turned out that there was no power to the school as well as a lot of the city.

Yes, classes were cancelled that morning, kind of like a Korean snow day. I decided to use my extra time to walk around with my camera and take as many photos as possible. Here are the results in photo form:

This is a restaurant right next to my apartment, the entire roof was blown off.

Another blown off roof:

At my school a giant billboard was blown off. Apparently it costs a few thousand bucks to replace and they haven't gotten around to it yet. Now the old sign it exposed, saying Jung Chul Yeong Oeh (Jung Chul English).

This place had giant piles of soju bottles. I think they had them all stacked, but then they blew away and they had to sweep them back up.

So this was a giant real estate building with a three story white square arch on it. It was entirely blow down and this is what was left over.

Another view, this one even more awesome.

Here were a bunch of pipes, I'm not really sure why they were there.

A bunch of trees were either broken or blown down to an angle all over town. Here is a few of them.

The entire side of this building had its foam siding blown down to expose the white bricks underneath.

Broken windows were pretty much everywhere, especially with taller buildings where the wind speed was higher.

So the city was pretty much ripped apart with a lot of damage done. Everywhere had signs blown down, roofs ripped off, and windows and broken glass everywhere. The first rain ended up taking away a lot of the broken glass, but theres still some remaining on the streets which can be a hazard for bike tires. There were also four deaths in Korea attributed to the typhoon, with one in Seosan where a man was hit by a shingle from a roof. Definitely one of the more interesting and exciting days of my time in Korea.